He laughed. “I packed you lunch today anyway. A peace offering. I hope you like turkey and Swiss on a roll.”
“I’ll eat anything someone else makes me.” She didn’t know what to say, so she resorted to common courtesy. “Thank you.”
“You didn’t eat breakfast, so I figured—”
“Sure I did.”
“A glass of orange juice isn’t breakfast.” He clambered around a rock to reach the stream’s edge. “Do you often skip meals?”
“Only when I lose track of time.” He’d lived with her for less than twenty-four hours and he had her pinned. “I get involved with the work and…then it’s midnight and I’m starving.” It wasn’t like she had anything else in her life but work now, anyway. Michael had seemed to understand that when they were living together. At least, she’d thought he had.
Then a scent came to her on a gust of wind. She paused and lifted her face to draw the perfume in deeper. “That’s honeysuckle. It’s close.”
“It’s twined around a tree, just up the bank.”
She followed the fragrance upstream until she found a tree trunk twined with vines. Feathering the leaves with her fingers, she eyed the blossoms higher up. Upon first look, this species looked closely related to limber honeysuckle, Lonicera dioca, but the flowers were an unusual shade of yellow and had a different shape and lacked the hairy edges.
A trill of discovery swept through her. “John must have been thrilled to stumble on this.”
“His voice rose several octaves higher than normal. I just remember choking on the smell.”
“Fruity-sweet,” she conceded. “Pungent.”
“Need any help?”
“No, I’ll collect samples.” She dropped down on one knee to muscle her backpack off. “It might take a while.”
He lifted the camera. “I’ll go hunting.”
He strode away, neck arched, searching the trees. The clearing seemed darker, duller, when he was gone. Shaking off the odd sensation, she got to work making observations about the surrounding flora. She had to check pH and water hardness levels in the stream nearby. She had to test the soil for alkalinity, and then collect the samples of the honeysuckle itself. She yanked open her pack and started pulling out plastic bags and test tubes, as Logan’s footsteps retreated.
Some time later, she was jolted out of concentration by the distinct click of a camera. She rose up out of her absorption to find a lens aimed directly at her. Her breath caught as Logan lifted his face from behind the camera, his narrowed eyes bright. He’d caught her unawares, and yet she felt keenly seen. She was overreacting. Capping the test tube in her hand, she straightened up and dropped the tube in the Styrofoam holder with the others.
“Good timing.” She stood up and smoothed her shorts down her thighs. “The flowers are too high for me to reach. I could use your help.”
He swung the camera off his head. “You do need me here.”
Need was an odd word, it sent a trill shooting through her as he dropped his camera on his pack and followed her to the tree. They stood, heads tilted back, watching bees meander from one blossom to another. Logan raised an arm and stretched up, but the blossoms hung just above his reach, too, only blooming in the range of the little dappled light that made it through the canopy.
“If you sit on my shoulders,” he said, dropping to one knee, “I can heft you up high enough to reach.”
She fixed on the exposed skin of the nape he was offering. He expected her to put his head between her thighs?
She said, “Not a good idea.”
“Afraid of heights?”
“No.” She didn’t feel like sinking her backside on those meaty shoulders, or putting herself in a position where her vulva would press against his hot nape. “I’m too heavy for you.”
“I can handle you, Red.”
I just bet you can. She didn’t want to imagine it, Logan with that tee-shirt stripped off his back, lowering his head between her thighs—Stop. Just stop. Why was she making a big deal of this? In graduate school, she’d climbed higher on a walking palm in Costa Rica just to get a better look at the yellow fruits. Short of heading back home, grabbing a ladder, and hauling it all the way out here, she didn’t have much of a choice but to accept Logan’s help.
He said, “Are you good?”
“S’pose.”
She swung one bare leg over his shoulder. He slapped a gritty hand around her thigh, fingers pressing into the flesh. She braced her hand on his head, shifted her weight, and then swung her other leg over his shoulder. His dark hair tickled the inside of her thighs as he shifted beneath her, lumbering up until her feet left the ground. She swayed as she rose, dizzy with the height and the heat of his breath along the inside of her thighs.
He said, solid beneath her, “Can you reach now?”
“Y-yes.” She loosened her death’s-grip on the plastic sample bag. Tightening her thighs on either side of his head, she started picking. “I’ll be done here as soon as I can.”
“Relax, Red.” He squeezed both thighs. “Loosen up.”
“S-sorry.”
Relaxing only made her backside sink deeper into the swell of his wide shoulders. His hair brushed soft on the tender skin of her abdomen, where her shirt had come free of the waistband of her shorts.
“So,” he said, flexing his grip on her legs, “how did you get into this field? You don’t strike me as a country girl.”
“I’m not.” She yanked the nearest blossoms off in fistfuls and stuffed them in the bag, probably bruising them. “I grew up in New York City. Move closer to the trunk if you can.”
“Ah the concrete madness of New York City.” He swayed forward. “A friend of mine lives there. I couldn’t take it for a day.”
She couldn’t help asking. “Where’d you grow up?”
“Montana. Is missing green things the reason you went into botany?”
“Not really.” She ducked her head to dodge a bee she’d dislodged from one of the flower cups. “I’m done,” she said, sealing the bag with a swipe of her fingers.
“That was quick.”
“It’s the bark and the leaves that hold the medicinal properties of this genus, generally, and I already took samples of those.” She sank as he dropped to one knee, until the soles of her fit hit the ground. “I just need a small sample of blossoms for a rougher analysis--Oh.”
Logan unlocked his head from the V of her thighs and swept out behind her, dragging his head against her lady parts. She swayed as he grasped her arms from behind, pulling her hard against his chest.
“Steady, Red.”
“I’m good.” She shoved away. He let her go as if he hadn’t just lit her up like a roman candle.
“So, city girl, if you liked that concrete madhouse so much, what are you doing here in the woods of Washington picking flowers?”
“So many questions, Macallister.” She turned away and strode to her backpack to unzip another section for the blossom samples.
“Don’t run away.” He followed right behind, a lumbering hunk of warm and tempting man. “I’m curious as to how you became you.”
“My grandmother,” she stuttered, unsettled into the truth. “She had this great big plot of wild land in upstate New York.”
“You lived with her?”
“Only for a few months of summer. She was an amateur herbalist. Taught me everything.”
Those were the best summers of her life. Not a single tutoring session, piano lesson, or soccer practice for a full two and a half months. Long days bright and full of discovery as she plucked simples for the house. Rosemary, thyme, sage, wild daffodils, vervain, St. John’s Wort, fragrant and mysterious and full of magic. She and Granny would spend hours wandering over the property, watching a seed go from sprig to flower to berry. Quiet slow hours that stretched on forever, and that was the greatest gift Granny had given her. The feeling that she, tall skinny big-brained Jenny, had been important enough in someone’s life to merit the deep-focuse
d expenditure of a commodity as precious as time.
He said, suddenly close. “What are you thinking of right now, Jenny?”
Her breath caught. “Nothing—nothing.”
“Your whole face changed. I noticed it before, when I took the picture of you. You were thinking about something you’d lost. Something you still wanted.”
“Logan.”
She meant to speak his name as a warning, but her voice caught. Not a day had gone by that she hadn’t missed her grandmother. Now he stood only inches in front of her, perceiving more than he should, close enough for her to smell the scent of soap on his skin. Should she tell him? Why was he asking so many questions? Why would he care? She lifted her face and found herself caught in his gaze, full of curiosity and something more needy, far more intense. The light around Logan spun, maybe nothing more than the wind in the trees, changing the light. But, real or not, it didn’t stop a pressure from building low in her belly, a coiling tightness she recognized all too well.
“Hell, Jenny.” Logan slipped his fingers into her hair. “You keep looking at me like that. We both know this is going to happen, sooner or later.”
He lowered his mouth to her lips.
CHAPTER FOUR
Logan’s mouth touched hers like a jolt of lightning. The electricity shot through to her toes. Jenny swayed back out of reflex but his lips clung. Her heart kicked up its pace, trilled in an odd rhythm as he rumbled a deep-throated sound and shifted his stance so that the heat of his big body poured over hers, as he dove in for another taste.
Had she said his name aloud? She thought she’d said something. She could barely think two words in sequence. Her breathing had dropped out of sync, she sipped air between kisses. He pulled back a fraction to rub his forehead against hers as he mumbled something unintelligible before he kissed her again. The sun braised her shoulders. The gurgle of the river sang in her ears. The wind teased tendrils as her eyelids became too heavy to stay open. The heavy scent honeysuckle cast a sweet fog over her mind. Her thoughts were the wind-blown seeds of a dandelion head, scattering far and wide, as Logan’s fingers dug into her scalp, as he urged her lips apart and teased her mouth with his tongue.
What was happening? She was standing—her feet flat on the soft bedding of pine needles—but she may as well be floating a few feet of the ground. His hair slipped soft between her fingers, the bristle of his jaw scraping the butt of her hand. She smelled the roasted coffee on his breath, felt the smooth slip of his teeth with her tongue. An ache intensified between her thighs and her knees threatened to weaken, to pull her down, and him upon her—
“Stop.”
He stilled, a swift hardening of muscle inches from her face. He pinned her in place with those pale green eyes. She took two stumbling steps away back, pressing the back of her arm against her mouth to stop the insistent throbbing.
Logan stood, his chest rising and falling, breathing hard.
She held up a hand though he hadn’t come an inch closer. “Let me catch my breath.”
“I like you breathless.”
“Logan.”
“Damn it, Jenny. Your eyes screamed yes.”
Her reflexive denial didn’t make it past her throat. She never was a good liar. She had wanted him to kiss her. She still wanted him.
She dropped her arm from her mouth and harnessed frustration instead. “Do you usually go around kissing the socks off of unsuspecting women?”
“It wasn’t your socks I was trying to get off.”
She clutched her chest, still imprinted with the muscular mysteries of that solid chest. “Listen,” she said, her pulse racing, “if this is some kind of man-in-the-wilderness, sex-under-the-open-sky kind of thing, you picked the wrong girl.”
“I really got your circuits crossed, didn’t I?”
“If it’s a quick roll in the dicranoweisia cirrhata you’re looking for,” she said, feeling more flushed by the minute, “I’m just not interested.”
“We just lit up the whole forest, Jenny.”
“It’s time to go.” She turned her back to him. At her feet lay the bag of honeysuckle blossoms she’d held in her hands before he kissed her. She must have dropped them, for the bag had burst open and now blossoms tumbled across the ground. “Once we’re home,” she said, crouching to stuff the flowers back into the sample bag, “we need to talk about the limits of this— Ouch!”
She heard the angry buzz, felt the vibration against her finger just as something pierced deep. She tumbled onto her backside and yanked her hand out of the bag, just as the body of a bumblebee fell from the stinger lodged in her skin.
She winced as the poisoned pain shot straight to her elbow, intensifying with every throb. She shook her hand in a vain effort to diffuse the pain.
A shadow fell over her as Logan crouched. “Let me see.”
“Just a sting.” She gritted her teeth. “Occupational hazard.”
“Bee stings can be serious.”
She winced an eye open, saw strained concern on his face. “It’s your fault I’m stung.”
“We both were distracted.” He turned her hand over, fully focused. “Where is it?”
“Doesn’t matter.” She yanked her hand away from him. “The pain will go away in fifteen minutes or so.”
“Sooner if you get the stinger out.”
“It’s emptied of bee venom by now.”
She cradled her aching hand as Lucas reached into his back pocket, flipped his wallet, and thumbed out a black credit card so metallically stiff it could be used to slice cheese.
Was that a platinum card?
She pulled her hand away. “Don’t.”
“C’mon, Jenny.”
“You’ll just push the stinger in farther.”
“Trust me.”
“Seriously?”
A muscle flexed in his cheek. “I won’t kiss the sting. Is that what you need to hear?”
She sighed in frustration. She was overreacting to everything today. Logan was used to kissing women senseless, but she wasn’t used to having her better sense fried. She willed her heartbeat to slow and then shoved her injured hand toward him.
“You’re not allergic, are you?” With the edge of the credit card, he probed the lump rising around the stinger.
“No.” Did he have to lean in so close? “I’ve been stung before.”
“You could still have a reaction.” His green gaze rose up to meet hers. “You are flushed.”
“The sun,” she said tightly, “is hot.”
“Any tightness in your chest?” He flicked the card across the lump and leaned in close to inspect the rising welt. “Having difficulty breathing?”
“No.” She stopped breathing so she wouldn’t smell the scent of his soap. “Did you get it out?’
“Yes.” Tucking the card in his back pocket, he slid his other hand down her wrist to press her pulse. “Feeling itchy?”
“Logan—”
“We should check for hives.”
“All over my body, I suppose?”
He slow-lifted his lids. “I wouldn’t want to miss a spot.”
“You’re enjoying yourself.”
He raised his brows. “Not as much as I’d like to be.”
She glared, but the look that made graduate students flee only made Logan wink.
“Time to head home.” She shot to her feet.
“First,” he said, lumbering all, “take some antihistamine.”
She swept past him and grabbed the discarded sample bag. “I will when I get home.”
“You didn’t bring any with you?”
“I don’t usually get stung.”
“You don’t usually get kissed senseless in the middle of the woods, either.”
She threw him a challenge. “Never without warning.”
“Life is full of surprises. Ever hear of anaphylactic shock?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of it.” It was definitely shock she was feeling. It had been too long since she’d be
en so thoroughly kissed.
“Your blood pressure rises,” he said. “Your pulse races. The airways narrow, making it hard to breathe.”
Sounds about right. “I’ll take an antihistamine when we get home,” she said, hauling her pack on her back. “Will that suffice, Doctor Logan?”
“You’ll take some when we get back to the car. I’ve got a first aid kit there—I should have brought it with me.” He swung his pack over his shoulder. “And I am a doctor, Jenny. Doctor Macallister.”
She stopped short.
“Seems neither one of us is exactly who we seem.”
***
Logan sank the blade of the chain saw into the pine trunk, holding the buzzing tool steady as steel met wood. He’d been chopping this fallen trunk into smaller sections since morning, when dew still clung to the grass. Now the sun had dried the grass stiff. Insects buzzed in the heat. A few more passes of the saw and this log would be in pieces just the right size for his purposes. Then he could really get down to work.
A thick, circular slice of wood fell to a pillow of sawdust on the shed floor. Logan shut the chainsaw off, planted it on the worktable nearby and raised a bottle to his lips. The water had long lost its coolness, but at least it slid wet down his throat. Finishing the last drop, he swiped his arm across his forehead and stepped out of the shelter of the shed, hoping for a cooling breeze.
His gaze shifted, inevitably, to the basement window. The glow of a bare bulb was visible through the grime. She was at it again. Rather, she was at it, still. In the two days since they’d returned from the park, she’d barely budged from the gloominess of the lab. But for the sight of that bare bulb and the sound of clanking glassware, he wouldn’t even know that he had a gorgeous, cantankerous redhead for a roommate.
He lobbed the empty bottle toward the recycling bin and then ran his chaff-flecked fingers through his hair. Wasn’t he a charmer? The only woman he’d taken a liking to in a long time—a colleague of a friend, no less—and he was screwing it up. He didn’t think he’d misread her in the park, but now she popped her head out of her subterranean refuge only when he wasn’t around to see her. The only evidence he had that she was eating was the slowly depleting supply of deli meats in the refrigerator. The only evidence that she was showering was the vague scent of strawberry shampoo lingering in the hallway in the morning.
Alone With You (Cabin Fever Series Book 1) Page 4